Japanese WiiWare titles pirated on U.S. Wiis

For those readers who just can't wait one more week for the U.S. launch of WiiWare, Twilight Hackers have now made it possible to illegally install downloaded Japanese WiiWare titles on North American Wiis. The below video shows how a WAD installer can be used to extract game data from an SD card and install it to show up on the Wii's Channel Menu, just like a normal, legally downloaded game.

While playing Tetris and Pong on your Wii is one thing, playing pirated WiiWare games is another thing entirely -- a thing that could cost Nintendo a lot of money, to be specific. We have to wonder how long the company can turn a blind eye to this hole in its system security now that it has the potential to impact an extremely profitable part of its business.

For those readers who just can't wait one more week for the U.S. launch of WiiWare, Twilight Hackers have now made it possible to illegally install downloaded Japanese WiiWare titles on North American Wiis. The below video shows how a WAD installer can be used to extract game data from an SD card and install it to show up on the Wii's Channel Menu, just like a normal, legally downloaded game.

While playing Tetris and Pong on your Wii is one thing, playing pirated WiiWare games is another thing entirely -- a thing that could cost Nintendo a lot of money, to be specific. We have to wonder how long the company can turn a blind eye to this hole in its system security now that it has the potential to impact an extremely profitable part of its business.

Actually, Nintendo doesn't make much money on the wiiware titles, I just saw an interview, the 3rd party companies make the most money on the wiiware titles as opposed to vc titles where Nintendo makes most the money despite the fact that the game may have been made by sega or whoever because Nintendo is the one that encodes all the vc titles while wiiware is left completely to the developers

as for this news its actually a little old, I even tried it myself a few days ago with Dr. Mario, and while the start up screen loaded, trying to play the game only brought me back to the channel selection screen, I assume my wii isn't updated enough or was confused by the different region channel and just went back

So you didn't care about the dangers of removing the time limit from the channels when people had no idea what could happen to them for using 'em... Now you don't care when said channels are going to be made useless when Nintendo decides to paths this? That's nice.

It's going to happen... Hacked channels are based on the same exploits as pirated VC games, and pirated VC games are based on the same exploits as pirated WiiWare games. Fix WiiWare and VC, say goodbye to custom channels.